The Internal Revenue Code is a hopeless jungle of provisions meant to encourage this and discourage that, including at least twelve preferences targeted at higher education. So writes Joseph Thorndike in this Forbes piece. He says, “those tax breaks don’t work very well. As a group, they are poorly targeted and needlessly complex. Many deliver benefits to students who would attend college even without tax assistance — yet they still fail to provide adequate help for those in real need.”

We may have here one of those issues where people from different points on the political spectrum can come together. Thorndike notes that the Center for American Progress has recently attacked higher ed preferences in the tax code.

I can’t agree entirely with his piece — he repeats the old canard that “college is still a good deal” and does not want to just extract the feds from higher education entirely as I favor. Nevertheless, tax preferences seem like an easy target as we begin to un-do decades of faulty federal policy.